Decolonising Urban Space: What It Means and How It Is Done

Decolonising urban space is the process of identifying and dismantling the hierarchies that colonisation left inscribed in the form of cities, the European town against the native town, the serviced centre against the abandoned periphery, the street names and monuments of colonial power, and of replacing them with ways of planning and inhabiting built from the societies that suffered them. Ananya Roy and Jennifer Robinson have given that process its theoretical basis: Roy by showing that the informality of the Global South is a colonial and state product, and Robinson by demanding that Southern cities stop being measured with Northern concepts. Their work makes decolonisation a task for planning, not only for memory.

The colonial city: a compartmentalised world independence did not undo

The colonial city was designed as an instrument of domination. Frantz Fanon described it in 1961 as a compartmentalised world: the settler's town, solid, lit and paved, and the colonised's town, overcrowded and without services, separated by barracks and police stations. Anthony King documented in Colonial Urban Development (1976) how that separation was codified in zoning, sanitary rules and architecture in Delhi, Lagos or Nairobi. Independence rarely undid it: national elites occupied the European districts and the periphery remained the city of the others, with informality as the only way in.

Ananya Roy: informality as colonial and state inheritance

Roy, in Urban Informality: Toward an Epistemology of Planning (2005), argues that this informality is not a residue but a mode of urbanization the state itself produces by deciding which occupations it tolerates, which it demolishes and which it legalises, a discretion inherited from colonial government. Decolonising urban space therefore requires recognising the self-built city as legitimate, giving security of tenure and services to what has already been built and abandoning the idea that the imported master plan is the only possible city. Roy also criticises expert planning that still treats the inhabitants of the South as objects of development.

Jennifer Robinson: decolonising urban thought

Robinson, in Ordinary Cities (2006), attacks the intellectual hierarchy. Urban theory has been built from Paris, Chicago or Los Angeles and applied to the South as a measure of what is missing, reproducing the colonial gaze that divided the world into modern and backward. Her proposal to treat all cities as ordinary, that is, as sources of knowledge, and to compare from anywhere, is the decolonisation of urban thought. Lagos, Lusaka or La Paz have as much to teach about urban life as London, and planning that does not recognise it plans against its own inhabitants.

Decolonising practices: names, monuments, Indigenous planning and upgrading

Decolonisation has concrete expressions. The renaming of streets and the removal of colonial monuments, from the Rhodes Must Fall movement in Cape Town in 2015 to the revision of street names in European and Latin American cities. The incorporation of Indigenous planning in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, with rights over territory and their own ways of governing space. In situ upgrading of settlements instead of their clearance. And the protection of heritage and popular uses against a conservation that values only colonial architecture. None is enough alone, and all meet resistance.

The lesson of Roy and Robinson is that decolonising urban space is not a symbolic gesture but a reorganisation of who plans, for whom and with what concepts. An inclusive city in the Global South, and also in the North that receives its migrants, is one that recognises the ways of inhabiting that colonisation marginalised, distributes services and tenure without conditioning them on formality and learns from its own neighbourhoods before imported models. That is the city decolonisation proposes to build.